eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

August 2017

08/27/2017

Traditional economic theory was based on the Enlightenment assumption that while people were irrational, as a species, we could depend on a trajectory towards rationality such that one should always bet that humans would be more rational in the future than they were now. Behavioral Economist counter that humans are essentially wired for irrationality and that it is smarter to accept that they are irrational and will always be so – and then to learn how to predict *how* they will be irrational by experimenting and doing empirical tests. Richard Thaler calls is “evidence based economics.”

There is a part of me that sees the Behavioralist argument as the more accurate one. But something deeper inside me says, “Why, if we can point out an irrationality, can we not teach people to stop acting irrational in that way?” The behavioralist, I believe, would argue that we must accept the realities of the brain and that it has limitations (bounded rationality). Just as we cannot stop ourselves from seeing an optical illusion even when we know it is an optical illusion, we cannot stop ourselves from making irrational decisions even when we know we are making them.

Behavioral economists also argue for something they call “bounded will power.” That is, they argue that while in theory, we humans have the ability to make choices that are in our long-term rational self-interest, we fail to always exercise that freedom. Our capacity to choose what is best for us is not limited in theory but it seems to be in practice – just as our capacity to be rational is not limited in theory while it is in practice.

Thirdly, Behavioral economists assert bounded self-interest. That is, where traditional economists would argue that people will always act in their own self-interest, behavioral economists will say that in practice, they will place limits on the self’s domain. For example, if you give a person a $100 and tell them that there is a partner somewhere in the world who will receive whatever part of that $100 they wish to give but, the partner has the ability to reject the offer such that neither person gets anything, a lot of people will split the money 50-50 to avoid the offer being rejected (the average offer is about $40 out of the $100.) But if you ask another person in the world if they would rather split $10 with the person who got the short end of the split or split $12 with the person who chose to be selfish and give himself more of the $100 than he gave away, the majority of people will take the $5 instead of the $6 in order to inflict some justice upon the greedy person. This is not what a computer would do. “81% of people in the study that Thaler conducted chose to share with a fair allocator. People are clearly willing to take a financial hit to punish unfair offerors. This is referred to as “inequity aversion.”

It is worth noting many of the conclusions that behavioral economists have drawn in studying the actual economic decision making of human beings. Here are a few of them:

Reference Points: People will decide whether a deal is a good deal or a bad deal based on some imaginary reference point. If the car is $20,000 but 5% below the Manufacturers Suggested retail Price (MSRP), it is a good deal. If it is $20,000 but 5% above the Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price, it is a bad deal. Same $20,000. This is why letting manufacturers set the MSRP, is just silly. These examples are examples of the irrationalities of human mental accounting. Thaler argues that we are particularly vulnerable to this sort of manipulation when we are faced with a decision to buy something we rarely shop for (houses, cars, mattresses” etc. Getting people to perceive that they have gotten a good deal may well be more important than giving them a good deal. As people want products but also want to sense that they somehow saved money in getting them. This is called transaction utility.

Thaler gives the following example from his life as a college teacher.

“Finally, an idea occurred to me. On the next exam, I made the total number of points available 137 instead of 100. This exam turned out to be slightly harder than the first, with students getting only 70% of the answers right, but the average numerical score was a cheery 96 points. The students were delighted! No one’s actual grade was affected by this change, but everyone was happy. From that point on, whenever I was teaching this course, I always gave exams a point total of 137, a number I chose for two reasons. First, it produced an average score well into the 90s, with some students even getting scores above 100, generating a reaction approaching ecstasy. Second, because dividing one’s score by 137 was not easy to do in one’s head, most students did not seem to bother to convert their scores into percentages.”

“In the eyes of an economist, my students were ‘misbehaving.’ By that I mean that their behavior was inconsistent with the idealized model of behavior that is at the heart of what we call economic theory. To an economist, no one should be happier about a score of 96 out of 137 (70%) than 72 out of 100, but my students were. And by realizing this, I was able to set the kind of exam I wanted but still keep the students from grumbling.”

Another irrational habit the behavioral economists have identified has to do with framing. People can be induced to make different decisions based solely on how the question is presented. “Do you wish to opt out of the organ donor program? Or “Do you wish to opt into the organ donating program?” If people believe from the way that you ask the question that most people want to be in it, then they will be reluctant to opt out, and visa versa. Consider the question Thaler asks by way of illustration. Two groups of people will be asked one of the two following questions.

A. Suppose by attending this lecture you have exposed yourself to a rare fatal disease. If you contract the disease you will die a quick and painless death sometime next week. The chance you will get the disease is 1 in 1,000. We have a single dose of an antidote for this disease that we will sell to the highest bidder. If you take this antidote the risk of dying from the disease goes to zero. What is the most you would be willing to pay for this antidote?

B. Researchers at the university hospital are doing some research on that same rare disease. They need volunteers who would be willing to simply walk into a room for five minutes and expose themselves to the same 1 in 1,000 risk of getting the disease and dying a quick and painless death in the next week. No antidote will be available. What is the least amount of money you would demand to participate in this research study?

Mathematically, the question is the same and a rational person would answer in a similar way for both questions. But they do not. Thaler explains:

“The answers to the two questions were not even close to being the same. Typical answers ran along these lines: I would not pay more than $2,000 in version A but would not accept less than $500,000 in version B.”

People are not even close to rational.

Another logical error we often make is connected to what behavioral economists call “diminishing sensitivity to gains and losses.” This describes the reality that we make financial decisions differently when we are flush with money than we do when we are broke. If someone were to offer me a bet – my house for their mansion – and give me 20 to 1 odds, I should probably take that bet. But, if my life will be wrecked if I lose, I might not do it even if the odds are 100 to 1. If I have the money for another house in the bank, I probably will. Being on the edge of survival will cause humans to act differently than they would other wise. Thus, our happiness increases as we get wealthier, but at a decreasing rate. As we get wealthier, we are made less and less happy by each added thousand dollars until the point where it almost has no impact. Thus, “changes in wealth matter more than levels of wealth.” The person who makes 25% more than last year and thus nets $5,000 is made happier than the person who makes 10% more than last year and thereby nets $20,000.

This is related to something called “loss aversion” and “sunk costs.” In short, we dislike losing about two and a quarter times as much as we like winning. Thus, someone who has lost a lot of money will take more risks to make the lost money back than a person who is ahead of where he started but just wants to make a bit more. The same amount of money will induce different levels of risky decision making based solely on the fact that one person is trying to avoid suffering a loss. If you buy a pair of shoes you will wear them even though they hurt because you can’t stand the idea of losing that money. If you make a bad investment, you will poor good money after bad to somehow avoid suffering that loss. A compute asked to calculate good bets, would not care what had been lost or would be lost.

Present Bias and Probability Weighting. This ingenious little irrationality is what will cause us to place more weight on a low probability event if that event has happened recently. For example, if there is a 1 in 1,000,000 chance of getting hit by lightning while golfing, you will golf. But if someone was actually hit by lightning while golfing last week, you will treat that potential possibility as having way more likelihood than it actually does. You will act as though somehow the odds have changed. Last year, the Patriots came back from a 25 point deficit in the Superbowl. Historically, over the course of NFL history, teams with a 25 point lead, as the Falcons had, have won 1057 times and lost 4 times. The odds of the Patriots coming back were ridiculously low.

They would be similarly ridiculous next year if the same scenario happened again. There is almost no statistical difference between 1057-4 and 1057-5. And yet, since this memory would be in people’s minds, it would carry more weight in their betting (to their rationalist detriment). A similar problem occurs when we overweight factors simply because they are available to us to see. We assume that if a factor is presented to us, it must be the most important factor. Thus, I could load a drink up with sugar but say on the bottle “gluten free” and people would rate the absence of gluten as an important distinction and would not even look to see the sugar content. By simply not mentioning an important factor, you can influence people’s decisions. People will irrationally use the factors you supply them as important, even if they are not.

Another interesting habit of irrationality we seem vulnerable to is called “discounted utility.” This involves the way that we value something right now as opposed to next year. If I say to a small child, “Would you like one marshmallow now or two marshmallows in an hour?” many of them will chose the one-now option. One now is worth more than two later. This makes very little sense. But if I say to the same children, “Would you like one marshmallow at 2:00 tomorrow or two marshmallows at 3:00 tomorrow,” they will almost inevitably chose the two-marshmallow option. Thaler describes this as a negotiation between the planner self and the doer self. The doer self has total control of what will happen right now. And the doer self cares entirely about the present self only. The planner self is the guardian ad litum of tomorrow’s doer self (who has not arrived and has no voice yet). All it has is the ability to inflict some guilt on the present self to offset the present doer self-‘s immediate pleasure.

This next logical quirk, relates to loss aversion in many ways. It is called “the endowment effect.” What it means is that the energy is will take to take a benefit away is far more than the energy it will take to get them a benefit. Consider what would happen if a restaurant started charging people to use their tables and chairs. Customers would be outraged? Why? Because they have never paid for tables and chairs before. And yet consider that Comcast will charge for the modem that you use to access the internet that you pay for. Why? Because it has always been done that way. It is not seen as adding a charge.

As examples of the endowment effect, consider how consumers would feel about a hardware store raising the price of shovels after a major snow storm. How would they feel if a cold drink vending machine was programmed to raise the price of drinks as the outside temperature rose (and easy feet of programming). Consider how people feel about record companies raising the price of a particular singer’s music the week after they die. In many parts of the economy, supply and demand forces are perfectly legitimate but only if they have been so forever. People do not like others to introduce randomness, uncertainty, or unopredictability to their status quo.

Confirmation Bias: If I see evidence for or against a certain assertion, it should not matter to me whether I previously believed or disbelieved that assertion. Logically, what my relationship is to the idea in question should be immaterial. And yet, it is not. People will generally prefer answers to questions that confirm their pre-conception. An idea is like a child. We become attached to them because it is work to rebuild a life based on an idea. We resist replacing an idea that we sense will require us to restructure our lives. We actually prefer to continue on in an inaccurate belief until forced to change by hard reality. This is hardly rational. Daniel Kahneman calls this “theory induced blindness.”

Law of Large Numbers: Another goofy little glitch in our calculating selves has to do with the way that the size of numbers impacts our thinking when we think about those numbers. If a bet would be a good bet over a hundred tries, then it is a good bet for just one. And yet we do not act like thatThe Law of Large Numbers tells us that sometimes people will base a decision not on actual odds but on the recent small sized experiment. Flip a coin ten times and it might just come out tails eight times. But basing a bet on the ratio of a million flips on that basis would be a bad idea. And yet humans will make that mistake often. . Incidentally, going into Superbowl 51, tails was leading heads 26-24.

According to behavioral economics, human beings generally live by “heuristics” rules rather than reason. They find more satisfaction obeying those rules than they do listening to mathematical logic.

There are many implications of this work and you will see people using it to advertise to you all the time. When is the last time you were mailed a thousand dollar “check” that you could use to buy a new car? Behavioral economists have become interested in applying the theories to the ways that governments make policies. They advocate the use of “choice architecture” to make it easy for irrational humans to make rational decisions. They also suggest the use of “nudging” to prompt people to be rational at just the points when they are most likely not to be. Thaler calls is “libertarian paternalism.”

Question for Comment: Is it time to surrender that Enlightenment assumption that we can teach ourselves out of our irrationalities? Or should we simply accept that our thinking faculties are always going to be handicapped and admit that we need some outside power to “think” for us?

08/20/2017

“Buy the truth, and sell it not; also wisdom, and instruction, and understanding.” – Proverbs 23:23

Psychologists tell us that there is a part of the brain that has an incredible ability to work to understand truth. They also tell us that this part of the brain will grow lazy if it is not made to develop a work ethic. And, as with the individual brain, so also with an entire culture, for they too can value or devalue the work of truth-seeking. Most people go through life solving problems that they have to solve. This makes sense. Why wouldn’t they? If in the process of solving their problems, they learn something true, they are okay with that. There other people who go through life trying to discover the truth; and if those people (I will call them “intellectuals”) happen to solve an actual problem in the process, they are okay with that. Make no mistake, “intellectual” is not a term that describes “smart people” in contrast to everyone else who we might call “dumb.” The intellectual is merely someone whose intelligence finds itself less motivated by pragmatism and practicality than most intelligent people. An intellectual might, for example, spend hours and hours reading a fifty year old book about anti-intellectualism just because he finds the subject interesting – because he wants to know the back story to something that he notices in his present culture. The reward may hold no fiscal advantage to him or her whatsoever. Intellectuals are thus often driven and motivated by questions regardless of whether or not they are actual problems.

An intellectual may not make a dime from what he learns. The problems of his life will be there when he is done. She will have solved none of her real world problems by means of her intellectual effort. She will simply have learned something she finds interesting and that will help her to think better and more accurately about other interesting things. Perhaps the word “intellectual” is another word for “fool” for, being so good at knowing things, he or she may not know what is actually worth knowing. I can’t help but think of the young college philosophy graduate who cannot find a job and takes work at his father’s hardware store. On the first day, his father gives him a broom and a mop and tells him to clean the basement of the hardware store. “Dad?!” whines the graduate. “I have a college degree!”

“Oh … right,” says his father, “Let me show you how to use that.”

Hofstadter explains why many people find the intellectual to be a superfluous use of a community’s food supplies when he says:

“Whatever the intellectual is too certain of, if he is healthily playful, he begins to find unsatisfactory. The meaning of his intellectual life lies not in the possession of truth but in the quest for new uncertainties. Harold Rosenberg summed up this side of the life of the mind supremely well when he said that the intellectual is one who turns answers into questions.” Incidentally, this book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. Perhaps the Russian launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 had made Americans realize that the study of space and physics and higher math was not as flighty an endeavor as they had supposed.[i]

This book takes about forty hours to read so it is not likely that many people will ever read it but nevertheless, it tells the story of anti-intellectualism in American life from its origins to 1962, the year I was born. If you were to read it, you would see clearly that just as America has had its economic boom and bust cycles, it has had its intellectual booms and busts as well. There have been times when the question asker has been greatly valued (and paid) and there have been extended times when the same individual has been mocked and derided for being so utterly “useless” to the masses. Hofstadter writes,

“Anti-intellectualism was not manifested in this country for the first time during the 1950’s [referring to McCarthyism]. Our anti-intellectualism is, in fact, older than our national identity, and has a long historical background. An examination of this background suggests that regard for intellectuals has not moved steadily downward and has not gone into a sudden, recent decline, but is subject to cyclical fluctuations.”

Hofstadter divides the book into chapters that concern different sources of anti-intellectualism in American history.

Among these, you will come across the following

Threatened religious leaders who believe that study is a distraction when there is direct revelation and inspiration to be had whenever we wish to have it.

Populist politicians who pander to masses comfortable in the belief that truths one cannot acquire while working in a factory or on a farm serve only to inflate the egos of those rich and lazy enough to care about them.

Successful businessmen who think that using intellectual energy on subjects that make no profit is ludicrous and take away talent and energy from more necessary things.

Educational leaders who are given the task of teaching masses of students who do not themselves see any reason to be concerned with any matter that does not fall into the category of “what matters to my life today or my career tomorrow?”

It is worth noting that Hofstadter is not incapable of seeing some criticisms of intellectualism as legitimate. Where intellectuals use their book knowledge to snobbishly assert their “betterness,” he notes it. Where they seek to create a vetting mechanism for tagging and excluding those less educated, he notes it. “I can only say that I do not suffer from the delusion that the complexities of American history can be satisfactorily reduced to a running battle between the eggheads and the fatheads,” he says.

“This book is a critical inquiry, not a legal brief for the intellectuals against the American community. I have no desire to encourage the self-pity to which intellectuals are sometimes prone by suggesting that they have been vessels of pure virtue set down in Babylon. One does not need to assert this, or to assert that intellectuals should get sweeping indulgence or exercise great power, in order to insist that respect for intellect and its functions is important to the culture and the health of any society, and that in ours this respect has often been notably lacking.”

I found his sources fascinating. I have 27 pages of notes. I will spare you by supplying a representative sample.

Religious Anti-Intellectualism:

Hofstadter notes that democratization impacted all aspects of American life between the colonial era and the rise of Jacksonian democracy. Perhaps nowhere was it more pronounced in its influence than in religion where masses of people converted to denominations lead and taught by no few ministers who saw study as a potential hindrance to good preaching. “The various denominations responded in different ways to this necessity’” Hofstadter says of the geographical dispersal of millions of people across the West, all needing to be brought into the fold, “but in general it might be said that the congregations were raised and the preachers -were lowered.”

"’Without study too!’ Here we are close to one of the central issues of the Great Awakening. An error of ‘former times’ was now being revived, [Charles] Chauncy [a 17th Century clergiman and President of Harvard College] asserted, the error of the heretics and popular preachers who said that ‘they needed no Books but the Bible.’ ‘They pleaded there was no need of learning in preaching, and that one of them could by the SPIRIT do better than the Minister by his learning; as if the SPIRIT and Learning were opposites.’ This, Chauncy thought, was the fundamental error of the revivalists: Their depending on the Help of the SPIRIT as to despise Learning.”

Following are examples from sources that Hofstadter quotes:

Here is the Methodist circuit-rider, Peter Cartwright (1856):

“Suppose, now, Mr. Wesley had been obliged to wait for a literary and theologically trained band of preachers before he moved in the glorious work his day, what would Methodism have been in the Wesleyan connection today? ... If Bishop Asbury had waited for this choice literary band of preachers, infidelity -would have swept these United States from one end to the other. . . .

The Presbyterians, and other Calvinistic branches of the Protestant Church, used to contend for an educated ministry, for pews, for instrumental music, for a congregational or stated salaried ministry. The Methodists universally opposed these ideas; and the illiterate Methodist preachers actually set the world on fire (the American world at least) while they were lighting their matches! . . . I do not wish to undervalue education, but really I have seen so many of these educated preachers who forcibly reminded me of lettuce growing under the shade of a peach-tree, or like a gosling that had got the straddles by wading in the dew, that I turn away sick and faint. Now this educated ministry and theological training are no longer an experiment. Other denominations have tried them, and they have proved a perfect failure. . . .

I awfully fear for our beloved Methodism. Multiply colleges, universities, seminaries, and academies; multiply our agencies, and editorships, and fill them with all our best and most efficient preachers, and you localize the ministry and secularize them too; then farewell to itinerancy; and when this fails we plunge right into Congregationalism, and stop precisely where all other denominations started. . . . Is it not manifest that the employing of so many of our preachers in these agencies and professorships is one of the great causes why we have such a scarcity of preachers to fill the regular work? Moreover, these presidents, professors, agents, and editors get a greater amount of pay, and get it more certainly too, than a traveling preacher, who has to breast every storm, and often falls very far short of his disciplinary allowance. Here is a great temptation to those who are qualified to fill those high offices to seek them, and give up the regular work of preaching and trying to save souls. . . .

Perhaps, among the thousands of traveling and local preachers employed and engaged in this glorious work of saving souls, and building up the Methodist Church, there were not fifty men that had anything more than a common English education, and scores of them not that; and not one of them was ever trained in a theological school or Biblical institute, and yet hundreds of them preached the Gospel with more success and had more seals to their ministry than all the sapient, downy D.D’s [Doctor of Divinity] in modern times, who, instead of entering the great and wide-spread harvest-field of souls, sickle in hand, are seeking presidencies or professorships in colleges, editorships, or any agencies that have a fat salary, and are trying to create newfangled institutions where good livings can be monopolized, while millions of poor, dying sinners are thronging the way to hell without God, without Gospel. . . .

What has a learned ministry done for the world, that have studied divinity as a science? Look, and examine ministerial history. It is an easy thing to engender pride in the human heart, and this educational pride has been the downfall and ruin of many preeminently educated ministers of the Gospel. But I will not render evil for evil, or railing for railing, but will thank God for education, and educated Gospel ministers who are of the right stamp, and of the right spirit. But how do these advocates for an educated ministry think the hundreds of commonly educated preachers must feel under the lectures we have from time to time on this subject? It is true, many of these advocates for an improved and educated ministry among us, speak in rapturous and exalted strains concerning the old, illiterate pioneers that planted Methodism and Churches in early and frontier times; but I take no flattering unction to my soul from these extorted concessions from these velvet-mouthed and downy D.D’s; for their real sentiments, if they clearly express them, are, that we were indebted to the ignorance of the people for our success.”

Here is a manifesto from a group of revivalist ministers from the early 19th Century

“That every brother that is qualified by God for the same has a right to preach according to the measure of faith, and that the essential qualification for preaching is wrought by the Spirit of God; and that the knowledge of the tongues and liberal sciences are not absolutely necessary; yet they are convenient, and -will doubtless be profitable if rightly used, but if brought in to supply the want of the Spirit of God, they prove a snare to those that use them and all that follow them.”

Here is the great Second Great Awakening revivalist preacher, Charles Finney:

“I had read nothing on the subject except my Bible; and what I had there found upon the subject, I had interpreted as I would have understood the same or like passages in a law book. Again; I found myself utterly unable to accept doctrine on the ground of authority. ... I had no where to go but directly to the Bible, and to the philosophy or workings of my own mind. . .” As to literature: "I cannot believe that a person who has ever known the love of God can relish a secular novel.” "Let me visit your chamber, your parlor, or wherever you keep your books. What is here? Byron, Scott, Shakespeare, and a host of triflers and blasphemers of God."

“Even the classical languages, so commonly thought necessary to a minister, were of dubious benefit,” according to Finney. Students at Eastern colleges would spend,

"four years ... at classical studies and no God in them."

And upon graduation,

"such learned students may under stand their hie, Juiec, hoc, [Latin] very well and may laugh at the humble Christian and call him ignorant, although he may know how to win more souls than five hundred of them. . . . The race is an intellectual one. The excitement, the zeal, are all for the intellect. The young man . . . loses the firm tone of spirituality. . . . His intellect improves, and his heart lies waste."

"It makes no difference how you get a man to God, provided you get him there."

Hofstadter writes:

“Although he had no desire to undermine the established ministry or its training, he cordially approved of laymen in religious work and felt that seminary-educated ministers ‘are often educated away from the people.’ [Moody] denigrated all education that did not serve the purposes of religion for secular education, he said, instead of telling men what a bad lot they are, flatters them and tells them ‘how angelic they are because they have some education. An educated rascal is the meanest kind of rascal.’ Aside from the Bible, he read almost nothing. ‘I have one rule about books. I do not read any book, unless it will help me to understand the book.’ Novels? They were ‘flashy. ... I have no taste for them, no desire to read them; but if I did I would not do it.’ The theater? ‘You say it is part of one’s education to see good plays. Let that kind of education go to the four winds.’ Culture? It is ‘all right in its place,’ but to speak of it before a man is born of God is ‘the height of madness.’ Learning? An encumbrance to the man of spirit: ‘I would rather have zeal without knowledge; and there is a good deal of knowledge without zeal.’” Bradford: Moody, pp. 24, 25-6, 30, 35, 37, 64,

“I have heard of reform, reform,” wrote Moody,

“until I am tired and sick of the whole thing. It is regeneration by the power of the Holy Ghost that we need.”

As a consequence, says Hofstadter, ”Moody showed no patience for any kind of sociological discussion. Man was, and always had been, a failure in all his works. The true task was to get as many souls as possible off the sinking ship of this world.”

Here is the nationally known evangelist, Billy Sunday from the 1920’s.

“What do I care if some puff-eyed little dibbly-dibbly preacher goes tibbly-tibbling around because I use plain Anglo-Saxon words? I want people to know what I mean and that’s why I try to get down where they live.”

Literary preachers, he said, tried "to please the highbrows and in pleasing them miss the masses.” According to Hofstadter,

“The language used by Moody, simple though it was, lacked savor enough for Sunday. Moody had said: ‘The standard of the Church is so low that it does not mean much.’ Sunday asserted: ‘The bars of the Church are so low that any old hog with two or three suits of clothes and a bank roll can crawl through.’ Moody had been content with: ‘We don’t want intellect and money-power, but the power of God’s word.’ Sunday elaborated: ‘The church in America would die of dry rot and sink forty-nine fathoms in hell if all members were multimillionaires and college graduates.’” McLoughlin: Billy Sunday, pp. 164, 169.

“With Sunday it was quite another matter. He brooked no suggestion that fundamentalism was not thoroughgoing, impregnable, and tough. He turned his gift for invective as unsparingly on the higher criticism and on evolution as on everything else that displeased him. ‘There is a hell and when the Bible says so, don’t you be so black-hearted, low-down, and degenerate as to say you don t believe it, you big fool!’ Again: "Thousands of college graduates are going as fast as they can straight to hell. If I had a million dollars I’d give $999,999 to the church and $1 to education.’ ‘When the word of God says one thing and scholarship says another, scholarship can go to hell!’

Here is William Jennings Bryan"If we have to give up either religion or education, we should give up education."

Here is Billy Graham

“You can stick a public school and a university in the middle of every block of every city in America and you will never keep America from rotting morally by mere intellectual education. During the past few years the intellectual props have been knocked out from under the theories of men. Even the average university professor is willing to listen to the voice of the preacher. [In place of the Bible] we substituted reason, rationalism, mind culture, science worship, the working power of government, Freudianism, naturalism, humanism, behaviorism, positivism, materialism, and idealism. [This is the work of] so-called intellectuals. Thousands of these ‘intellectuals’ have publicly stated that morality is relative that there is no norm or absolute standard.” Billy Graham William G. McLcmghlin, Jr.; Billy Graham: Revivalist in a Secular Age (New York, 1960)]

Political Anti-Intellectualism:

Democratization also stimulated a metastasizing of anti-intellectualism in political life as well as religious life.

A good deal of the Federalist attack on Jefferson, for example, was directed at his bookish intellectualism.

“The Federalist writer, Joseph Dennie, saw in [Jefferson] a favorite pupil of the ‘dangerous, Deistical, and Utopian’ school of French philosophy. ‘The man has talents,’ Dennie conceded, “but they are of a dangerous and delusive kind. He has read much and can write plausibly. He is a man of letters, and should be a retired one. His closet, and not the cabinet, is his place. In the first, he might harmlessly examine the teeth of a non-descript monster, the secretions of an African, or the almanac of Banneker. . . . At the seat of government his abstract, inapplicable, metaphysico-politics are either nugatory or noxious. Besides, his principles relish so strongly of Paris and are seasoned with such a profusion of French garlic, that he offends the whole nation. Better for Americans that on their extended plains ‘thistles should grow, instead of wheat, and cockle, instead of barley,’ than that a philosopher should influence the councils of the country, and that his admiration of the works of Voltaire and Helvetius should induce him to wish a closer connexion with Frenchmen.”

With the defeat of John Quincy Adams by the populist, Andrew Jackson, college educations went out of style in political life entirely. No longer did Jefferson, Adams, Hamilton, and Madison own the regard of the public like the tobacco farming, Indian-killing, pistol dueling, self-made military “Gaston” who now found himself President of the country. “The first truly powerful and widespread impulse to anti-intellectualism in American politics,” says Hofstadter,

“was, in fact, given by the Jacksonian movement. Its distrust of expertise, its dislike for centralization, its desire to uproot the entrenched classes, and its doctrine that important functions were simple enough to be performed by anyone, amounted to a repudiation not only of the system of government by gentlemen which the nation had inherited from the eighteenth century, but also of the special value of the educated classes in civic life.”

“Adams was the last nineteenth-century occupant of the White House who had a knowledgeable sympathy with the aims and aspirations of science or who believed that fostering the arts might properly be a function of the federal government.”

“Jackson, it was said, had been lucky enough to have escaped the formal training that impaired the ‘Vigor and originality of the understanding.’ Here was a man of action, ‘educated in Nature’s school’ who was ‘artificial in nothing’; who had fortunately ‘escaped the training and dialectics of the schools’; who had a ‘judgement unclouded by the visionary speculations of the academician’; who had, ‘in an extraordinary degree, that native strength of mind, that practical common sense, that power and discrimination of judgement which, for all useful purposes, are more valuable than all the acquired learning of a sage’; whose mind did not have to move along ‘the tardy avenues of syllogism, nor over the beaten track of analysis, or the hackneyed walk of logical induction,’ because it had natural intuitive power and could go ‘with the lightning’s flash and illuminate its own pathway.’

“George Bancroft, who must have believed that his own career as a schoolmaster had been useless, rhapsodized over Jackson s unschooled mind:

‘Behold, then, the unlettered man of the West, the nursling of the wilds, the farmer of the Hermitage, little versed in books, unconnected by science with the tradition of the past, raised by the will of the people to the highest pinnacle of honour, to the central post in the civilization of republican freedom. . . . What policy will he pursue? What wisdom will he bring with him from the forest? What rules of duty will he evolve from the oracles of his own mind?’

Against a primitivist hero of this sort, who brought wisdom straight out of the forest, Adams, with his experience at foreign courts and his elaborate education, seemed artificial. “A group of Jackson s supporters declared that the nation would not be much better off for Adams’ intellectual accomplishments:

“That he is learned we are willing to admit;” Jackson’s followers offered about Quincy Adams, “but his wisdom we take leave to question. . . , We confess our attachment to the homely doctrine: thus happily expressed by the great English poet:

‘That not to know of things remote From use, obscure and subtle, but to know- That which before us lies in daily life, Is the prime wisdom.’ ‘

That wisdom we believe Gen. Jackson possesses in an eminent degree.’

“Most of the Brahmin world found itself unable to embrace Jackson as President,” Hofstadter writes,

“Harvard did award him an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws at its 1833 commencement, but Adams refused to attend. ‘I -would not be present’ he wrote, "to see my darling Harvard disgrace herself by conferring a Doctor’s degree upon a barbarian and a savage who can scarcely spell his own name."

If Jackson’s Presidency unleashed a wave of anti-intelectualism in American life, the famous frontiersman, Davy Crocket rode it all the way to Congress.

“It was Crockett s pride to represent the native style and natural intuition. In his autobiography, published in 1834, Crockett boasted of the decisions he handed down from the Tennessee bench at a time when he ‘could just barely write my own name.’ ‘My judgments were never appealed from, and if they had been they would have stuck like wax, as I gave my decisions on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and not on law learning to guide me; for I had never read a page in a law book in all my life.’ This ingenuous confidence in the sufficiency of common sense may have been justified by Crockett’s legal decisions, but he was not content to stop here: he had a considered disdain for the learned world. At one point in his Congressional career, Crockett reported: ‘ ‘There were some gentlemen that invited me to go to Cambridge, where the big college or university is; where they keep ready-made titles or nicknames to give people. I would not go, for I did not know but they might stick an LL.D. on me before they let me go; and I had no idea of changing ‘Member of the House of Representatives of the United States’ for what stands for ‘lazy lounging dunce,’ which I am sure my constituents would have translated my new title to be, knowing that I had never taken any degree, and did not own to any, except a small degree of good sense not to pass for what I was not. . . .”

Anti-Intellectualism in American political life may have reached maturity under the guiding hand of Tammany Hall in New York City where the famous George Washington Plunket asserted that an education was a handicap for all young men wishing to enter politics.

“If Tammany leaders were "all book worms and college professors,” Plunkitt declared,

“Tammany might win an election once in four thousand years. Most of the leaders are plain American citizens, of the people and near to the people, and they have all the education they need to whip the dudes who part their name in the middle. ... As for the common people of the district, I am at home with them at all times. When I go among them, I don t try to show off my grammar, or talk about the Constitution, or how many volts there is in electricity or make it appear in any way that I am better educated than they are. They wouldn’t stand for that sort of thing.” “Some young men think they can learn how to be successful in politics from books, and they cram their heads with all sorts of college rot. They couldn’t make a bigger mistake. Now, understand me, I ain’t sayin nothin against colleges. I guess they have to exist as long as there’s bookworms, and I suppose they do some good in certain ways, but they don’t count in politics. In fact, a young man who has gone through the college course is handicapped at the outset. He may succeed in politics, but the chances are 100 to 1 against him.” William L. Riordon: PLunkitt of Tammany Hall (1905; ed. New York, 1948), pp. 601.

In his footnote to Plunkitt’s advice to budding NY politicians, Hofstadter writes:

“One is reminded here of the techniques of the delightful Brooklyn Democratic leader Peter McGuiness. Challenged for the leadership of his district during the early 1920’s by a college graduate who maintained that the community should have a man of culture and refinement as its leader, McGuiness dealt with the new comer with a line that is a favorite of connoisseurs of political strategy. At the next meeting McGuiness addressed, he stood silent for a moment, glaring down at the crowd of shirtsleeved laborers and housewives in Hoover aprons until he had their attention. Then he bellowed, ‘A11 of yez that went to Yales or Cornells raise your right hands. . . . The Yales and Cornells can vote for him. The rest of yez vote for me.’ Richard Rovere: "The Big Hello in The American Establishment” (New York, 1962), p. 36.

If Plunkit was the archbishop of anti-intellectualism, Hiram Evans, the imperial wizard of the Klu Klux Klan in 1926 may have been the Pope. According to Hofstadter, Evens,

“wrote a moving essay on the Klan s purposes, in which he portrayed the major issue of the time as a struggle between ‘the great mass of Americans of the old pioneer stock’ and the ‘intellectually mongrelized Liberals.’ All the moral and religious values of the ‘Nordic Americans,’ he complained, were being undermined by the ethnic groups that had invaded the country, and were being openly laughed at by the liberal intellectuals. ‘We are a movement,’ Evans wrote, ‘of the plain people, very weak in the matter of culture, intellectual support, and trained leadership. We are demanding, and we expect to win, a return of power into the hands of the everyday, not highly cultured, not overly intellectualized, but entirely unspoiled and not de-Americanized, average citizen of the old stock.

Our members and leaders are all of this class the opposition of the intellectuals and liberals who hold the leadership, betrayed Americanism, and from whom we expect to wrest control, is almost automatic. This is undoubtedly a weakness. It lays us open to the charge of being ‘hicks’ and ‘rubes’ and ‘drivers of second-hand Fords.’ We admit it. Far worse, it makes it hard for us to state our case and advocate our crusade in the most effective way, for most of us lack skill in language. . . .

Every popular movement has suffered from just this handicap. . . .

The Klan does not believe that the fact that it is emotional and instinctive, rather than coldly intellectual, is a weakness. All action comes from emotion, rather than from ratiocination. Our emotions and the instincts on which they are based have been bred into us for thousands of years; far longer than reason has had a place in the human brain. . . . They are the foundations of our American civilization, even more than our great historic documents; they can be trusted where the fine-haired reasoning of the denatured intellectuals cannot.’”

Evans’ screed may well be the “Bull Unum Sanctum moment” at the apex of anti-intellectualisms political power in America but there certainly have been no shortage of revivals since. In Progressive Wisconsin for example, the college and university friendly politician Robert Lafollette was eventually replaced by a backlash candidate that swore to “clean house” with respect to intellectual meddling in the State’s affairs.

“The anti-intellectuals defeated La Follette’s Progressive successor,” says Hofstadter, “and returned to power with Emanuel L. Philipp, a railroad and lumber man. In his campaign Philipp featured anti-intellectualist denunciations of university experts, and called for a reduction in taxes, retrenchment in the university, and an end to its political ‘meddling.’ There must be, he said, a thorough house-cleaning at the university; socialism was gaining ground there, and ‘many graduates are leaving with ideas that are un-American.’

Still, Hofstadter reserves a space for his finest specimen of anti-intellectualism in political life by quoting Senator Lawrence Sherman of Illinois “who launched a long and ferocious diatribe against the expansion of governmental powers during the war, and particularly against ‘a government by professors and intellectuals.’” “This remarkable speech is replete with the clichés of anti-intellectualism, “says Hofstadter, “and though it can hardly be imagined to have had much influence at the time, it must be taken as a landmark in anti-intellectualist oratory.”

"... a coterie of politicians gilded and plated by a group of theorizing, intolerant intellectuals as wildly impractical as ever beat high heaven with their phrase-making jargon. . . . They appeal to the iconoclast, the freak, the degenerate . . . essayists of incalculable horsepower who have essayed everything under the sun ... a fair sprinkle of socialists. . . . Everything will be discovered. . . . Psychologists with X-ray vision drop different colored handkerchiefs on a table, spill a half pint of navy beans, ask you in a sepulchral tone what disease Walter Raleigh died of, and demand the number of legumes without counting. Your memory, perceptive faculties, concentration, and other mental giblets are tagged and you are pigeonholed for future reference. I have seen those psychologists in my time and have dealt with them. If they were put out in a forest or in a potato patch, they have not sense enough to kill a rabbit or dig a potato to save themselves from the pangs of starvation. This is a government by professors and intellectuals. I repeat, intellectuals are good enough in their places, but a country run by professors is ultimately destined to Bolshevism and an explosion."

No anthology of anti-intellectualism in American political life would be complete without a reference to Joseph McCarthy who never seems to have met an intellectual that he could not call a communist.

“Primarily it was McCarthyism which aroused the fear that the critical mind was at a ruinous discount in this country. Of course, intellectuals were not the only targets of McCarthy’s constant detonations. He was after bigger game. But intellectuals were in the line of fire, and it seemed to give special rejoicing to his followers when they were hit. His sorties against intellectuals and universities were emulated throughout the country by a host of less exalted inquisitors.”

And yet there is more. Hofstadter moves on to a lengthy discussion of anti-intellectualism in the American business community.

Commercial Anti-Intellectualism:

It is not difficult to hear echoes of things said today in the views of business leaders a hundred years ago, though on the whole, the makers of money have come to see the value in reaping benefits from the seekers of truth, particularly when it is technological in nature. But here is just one example of what commercial anti-intellectualism looks like from a hundred years ago.

"What we are opposed to, and what we appeal to you for protection against is a bill that will put our business in the hands of theorists, chemists, sociologists, etc., and the management and control taken away from the men who have devoted their lives to the upbuilding and perfecting of this great American industry” Chicago packer, Thomas E. Wilson, pleading before a Congressional committee in 1906

I will provide more on commercial anti-intellectualism when covering anti-intellectualism in education as the two are so closely related.

Educational Anti-Intellectualism: Perhaps one of the biggest ironies of the history of American anti-intellectualism is just how pervasive it is within the educational system itself. This part of the book was particularly fascinating. “What sort of educational reformer would be against the use of American schools for developing budding intellectuals?” I wondered.

“Exhibit L. The following remarks have already been made famous by Arthur Bestor, but they will bear repetition. After delivering and publishing the address excerpted here, the author, a junior high-school principal in Illinois, did not lose caste in his trade but was engaged for a similar position in Great Neck, Long Island, a post which surely ranks high in desirability among the nation’s secondary schools, and was subsequently invited to be a visiting member of the faculty of the school of education of a Midwestern university.

“Through the years we’ve built a sort of halo around reading, writing, and arithmetic. We’ve said they were for everybody . . . rich and poor, brilliant and not-so-mentally-endowed, ones who liked them and those who failed to go for them. The teacher has said that these were something ‘everyone should learn.’ The principal has remarked, ‘All educated people know how to -write, spell, and read.’ When some child declared a dislike for a sacred subject, he was warned that, if he failed to master it, he would grow up to be a so-and-so.

The Three R s for All Children, and All Children for the Three R’s! That was it.

We’ve made some progress in getting rid of that slogan. But every now and then some mother with a Phi Beta Kappa award or some employer who has hired a girl who can’t spell stirs up a fuss about the schools . . . and ground is lost. . . . When we come to the realization that not every child has to read, figure, write and spell . . . that many of them either cannot or will not master these chores . . . then we shall be on the road to improving the junior high curriculum.

Between this day and that a lot of selling must take place. But it’s coming. We shall someday accept the thought that it is just as illogical to assume that every boy must be able to read as it is that each one must be able to perform on a violin, that it is no more reasonable to require that each girl shall spell well than it is that each one shall bake a good cherry pie.

We cannot all do the same things. We do not like to do the same things. And we won’t. When adults finally realize that fact, everyone will be happier . . . and schools will be nicer places in which to live. . . .

If and when we are able to convince a few folks that mastery of reading, writing, and arithmetic is not the one road leading to happy, successful living, the next step is to cut down the amount of time and attention devoted to these areas in general junior high-school courses. . . .

One junior high in the East has, after long and careful study, accepted the fact that some twenty percent of their students will not be up to standard in reading and they are doing other things for these boys and girls. That’s straight thinking. Contrast that with the junior high which says, ‘Every student must know the multiplication tables before graduation.’

A. H. Lauchner: "How Can the Junior High School Curriculum Be Improved?" Bulletin of the National Association of Secondary-School Principals, Vol. XXXV (March, 1951), pp. 299-301. Hofstadter has much more to say about anti-intellectualism in education but this post is long as it is and thus, I will simply devote a second blog post to the topic.

[i] “Suddenly the national distaste for intellect appeared to be not just a disgrace but a hazard to survival. After assuming for some years that its main concern with teachers was to examine them for disloyalty, the nation now began to worry about their low salaries. Scientists, who had been saying for years that the growing obsession with security was demoralizing to research, suddenly found receptive listeners. Cries of protest against the slackness of American education, hitherto raised only by a small number of educational critics, were now taken up by television, mass magazines, businessmen, scientists, politicians, admirals, and university presidents, and soon swelled into a national chorus of self-reproach.”

Anti-Intellectualism in American Life REVIEW Part II – Business and Education Education

In a previous post, we looked at what Richard Hofstadter had to say about anti-intellectualism in American religion, politics, and business. In this post, we summarize his arguments about anti-intellectualism in American education. There is a certain irony here. How is it that the principle mechanism for socializing children into a love of truth-seeking can be commandeered and used to stifle the impulse altogether? I suspect that it is neither Hofdtadter’s nor my intent to make schools into academies of irrelevance that banish the curricula of the dollar-godded utilitarians entirely, but it is our intent to say that students should be encouraged and inspired to get interested in what interests them without having to justify the interest to their future potential employers.

So, here are some examples from the history of anti-intellectualism in American education. Hoftadter starts with a gentleman by the name of Wiilliam Manning of North Billerica, Massachusetts, who published a 1798 pamphlet decrying the public expenditure of tax money on schools. For Manning, education was nothing more than an elitist weapon of class warfare. He saw no reason why a school teacher should be paid anything more than a low-cost day laborer. Hofstadert writes:

“Here, then, is the key to Manning’s educational strategy. Education was to be made cheap for the common man; and higher education, such as there was, would be organized simply to serve elementary education to provide inexpensive instructors for the common schools. "Larning . . . aught to be promoted in the cheepest and best manner possable" in such a way, that is, that "we should soone have a plenty of school masters & misstrisejs as cheep as we could hire other labour, & Labour & Larning would be connected together & lessen the number of those that live without work."

“Advanced learning Manning considered to have no intrinsic value worth cultivating. Academies and classical studies that went beyond what was necessary "to teach our Children a b c" were "only to give imploy to gentlemens sons & make places for men to live without worke. For their is no more need for a mans haveing a knowledge of all the languages to teach a Child to read write & cifer than their is for a farmer to have the marinors art to hold plow.”

Examples throughout American history abound.

“The canons of the cult of experience required that the ambitious young man be exposed at the earliest possible moment to what one writer called ‘the discipline of daily life that comes with drudgery.’ Formal schooling, especially if prolonged, would only delay such exposure. The lumber magnate, Frederick Weyerhaeuser, concluded that the college man was ‘apt to think that because he is a college graduate he ought not be obliged to commence at the bottom of the ladder and work up, as the office boy does who enters the office when he is fourteen years of age.’”

“On two matters there was almost no disagreement: education should be more "practical"; and higher education, as least as it -was conceived in the old-time American classical college, was useless as a back ground for business. Business waged a long, and on the whole successful, campaign for vocational and trade education at the high-school level and did much to undermine the high school as a center of liberal education. The position of the Massachusetts wool manufacturer who said that he preferred workers with only a common-school education, since he considered that the more learned were only preparing themselves for Congress, and who rejected educated workmen on the ground that he could not run his mill with algebra, was in no way unusual or extreme; nor was the argument of the industrial publicist Henry Carey Baird was the founder of the first publishing firm in America specializing in technical and industrial books. "Too much education of a certain sort," he protested in 1885, “such as Greek, Latin, French, German, and especially bookkeeping, to a person of humble antecedents, is utterly demoralizing in nine cases out of ten, and is productive of an army of mean-spirited "gentlemen" -who are above what is called a "trade" and who are only content to follow some such occupation as that of standing behind a counter, and selling silks, gloves, bobbins, or laces, or to "keep books. . . . Our system of education, as furnished by law, when it goes beyond what in Pennsylvania is called a grammar school, is vicious in the extreme, productive of more evil than good. Were the power lodged with me, no boy or girl should be educated at the public expense beyond what he or she could obtain at a grammar school, except for some useful occupation. ‘The high school’ of today must, as I believe, under an enlightened system, be supplanted by the technical school, with possibly ‘shops’ connected with it. ... We are manufacturing too many ‘gentlemen’ and ‘ladies,’ so called, and demoralization is the result. . . . ‘Whenever I find a rich man dying and leaving a large amount of money to found a college, I say to myself, ‘It is a pity he had not died while he was poor.’"

Frederick Weyerhaeuser and Henry Carey Baird were not the only business interests that opposed an intellectual curriculum in the schools. The great industrialist, Andrew Carnegie also thought it was foolish to “leave no child behind” in schools. Though he donated money for libraries so that the meritorious could educate themselves, he apparently preferred his workers to have brains that obeyed more than they thought.

“On the classical college curriculum he [Carnegie] was unsparing. It was a thing on which men ‘wasted their precious years trying to extract education from an ignorant past whose chief province is to teach us, not what to adopt, but what to avoid.’ Men had sent their sons to colleges ‘to waste their energies upon obtaining a knowledge of such languages as Greek and Latin, which are of no more practical use to them than Choctaw’ and where they were ‘crammed with the details of petty and insignificant skirmishes between savages.’ Their education only imbued them with false ideas and gave them ‘a distaste for practical life.’ ‘Had they gone into active work during the years spent at college they would have been better educated men in every true sense of that term.’

Even founders of prestigious schools like Stanford had dim views of the intellectual life of the intellectualized eastern colleges.

“Leland Stanford was another educational philanthropist who had no faith in existing education. Of all the applicants for jobs who came to him from the East, the most helpless, he said, were college men. Asked what they could do, they would say ‘anything’ while in fact they had ‘no definite technical knowledge of anything,’ and no clear aim or purpose. He hoped that the university he endowed would overcome this by offering ‘a practical, not a theoretical education.’”

Opposition to intellectual activity for its own sake in higher education also came from the American farmer.

“As Ross points out, ‘the farmers themselves were the hardest to convince of the need and possibility of occupational training.’ When they did not resist the idea of such education, they resisted proposals that it have any university connections or any relation to experimental science. Separate farm colleges, severely utilitarian in purpose, would do. The Wisconsin Grange argued that each profession should be taught by its practitioners. ‘Ecclesiastics should teach ecclesiastics, lawyers teach lawyers, mechanics teach mechanics, and farmers teach farmers.’”

Politicians, seeking approval and votes of such farmers mimic their attitudes towards the intellectual.

“Some governors wanted to get as far away as possible from the tradition of liberal education represented by the classical colleges. The governor of Ohio wanted the instruction to be ‘plain and practical, not theoretically and artistically scientific in character’; the governor of Texas imagined that an agricultural college was ‘for the purpose of training and educating farm laborers’ The governor of Indiana thought that any kind of higher education would be a deterrent to honest labor.”

News papers often picked up the refrain.

“One paper called the agricultural colleges ‘asylums for classical idiots and political professors’ and another suggested that the necessary task was ‘to clean out the smug DJD’s and the pimply-faced Professors’ and put in their places men who have a lively sense of the lacks in learning among men and women who have to grapple daily with the world’s work in this busy age."

It is no wonder, Hofstadter notes in his day, that a President of Oklahoma University stated his desire to preside over a college that the football team could be proud of. At this point in Hofstadter’s book, he turns to anti-intellectualism in the elementary and secondary schools where this battle between “eggheads” and “fatheads” is settled. The chapter is entitled, “The School and the Teacher” and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the back-story to what is taking place in their own childrens’ schools.

The fight over whether or not tax payers wanted to fund intellectual activity began even while the fight to publically fund schools at all was just concluding. Horace Mann had to sell the idea of public education in Massachusetts by insisting that it would be good for business and the republic. In some respects, schools were to be thought advisable if they taught students not to think.

“Francis Bowen, Harvard’s professor of moral philosophy, concurred with Mann’s views; the New England school system, he said, looking backward in 1857, "had degenerated into routine, it was starved by parsimony. Any hovel would answer for a school-house, any primer would do for a text-book, any farmer s apprentice was competent to *teach school" American Journal of Education, Vol. IV (September, 1857), p. 14.

In 1870, when the country was on the eve of a great forward surge in secondary education, William Franklin Phelps, then head of a normal school in Winona, Minnesota, and later a president of the National Education Association, declared: 'They [the elementary schools] are mainly in the hands of ignorant, unskilled teachers. The children are fed upon the mere husks of knowledge. They leave school for the broad theater of life without discipline; without mental power or moral stamina. . . . Poor schools and poor teachers are in a majority throughout the country. Multitudes of the schools are so poor that it would be as well for the country if they were closed. . . . They afford the sad spectacle of ignorance engaged in the stupendous fraud of self-perpetuation at the public expense. . . . Hundreds of our American schools are little less than undisciplined juvenile mobs.”

In 1892 Joseph M. Rice toured the country to examine its school systems and reported the same depressing picture in city after city, with only a few welcome exceptions: education was a creature of ward politics; ignorant politicians hired ignorant teachers; teaching was an uninspired thing of repetitive drill. Ten years later, when the Progressive movement was barely under way, the New York Sun had a different kind of complaint:

‘When we were boys, boys had to do a little work in school. They were not coaxed; they were hammered. Spelling, writing, and arithmetic were not electives, and you had to learn. In these more fortunate times, elementary education has become in many places a vaudeville show. The child must be kept amused, and learns what he pleases. Many sage teachers scorn the old-fashioned rudiments, and it seems to be regarded as between a misfortune and a crime for a child to learn to read.’”

“The tradition seems to have persisted well on into the nineteenth century, when we find this sad confession: "The man who was disabled to such an extent that he could not engage in manual labor who was lame, too fat, too feeble, had the phthisic or had fits or was too lazy to work well, they usually made schoolmasters out of these, and thus got what work they could out of them."

"If a young man be moral enough to keep out of State prison, he will find no difficulty in getting approbation for a schoolmaster.”

Some years later President Joseph Caldwell of the University of North Carolina waxed indignant about the recruitment of the school teachers of his state: ‘Is a man constitutionally and habitually indolent, a burden upon all from whom he can extract support? Then there is one way of shaking him off, let us make him a schoolmaster. To teach school is, in the opinion of many, little else than sitting still and doing nothing. Has any man wasted all his property, or ended in debt by indiscretion and misconduct? The business of school-keeping stands -wide open for his reception, and here he sinks to the bottom, for want of capacity to support himself. Has any one ruined himself, and done all he could to corrupt others, by dissipation, drinking, seduction, and a course of irregularities? Nay, has he returned from prison after an ignominious atonement for some violation of the laws? He is destitute of character and can not be trusted, but presently he opens a school and the children are seen flocking into it, for if he is willing to act in that capacity, we shall all admit that as he can read and -write, and cypher to the square root, he will make an excellent schoolmaster.”

A vicious circle had been drawn. American communities had found it hard to find, train, or pay for good teachers. They settled for what they could get, and what they got was a high proportion of misfits and incompetents. They tended to conclude that teaching was a trade which attracted rascals, and, having so concluded, they were reluctant to pay the rascals more than they were worth. To be sure, there is evidence that the competent schoolteacher of good character was eagerly welcomed when he could be found, and soon earned a status in the community higher than that of his colleagues elsewhere; but it was a long time before any considerable effort could be made to improve the caliber of teachers generally.”

“Here no doubt the American educational creed itself needs further scrutiny. The belief in mass education was not founded primarily upon a passion for the development of mind, or upon pride in learning and culture for their own sakes, but rather upon the supposed political and economic benefits of education. No doubt leading scholars and educational reformers like Horace Mann did care for the intrinsic values of mind. But in trying to persuade influential men or the general public of the importance of education, they were careful in the main to point out the possible contributions of education to public order, political democracy, or economic improvement.”

“There is also some evidence that the anti-intellectualism I have already characterized in religion, politics, and business found its way into school practice. There seems to have been a prevailing concern that children should not form too high an estimate of the uses of mind.” A fifth reader of 1884 quoted Emerson’s Goodbye:

I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophists’ schools, and the learned clan; For what are they all in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet.

Educational reformers were no doubt pleased with the progress that was to be made when children were required to attend school. But if their vision was to give all of the sort of education that the wealthy had typically given to their sires in the private schools of New England, they were to be sadly disappointed. Putting a hockey team on a stage will not make them ballet dancers. “Now, in an increasing measure,” writes Hofstadter,

“secondary-school pupils were not merely unselected but also unwilling; they were in high school not because they wanted further study but because the law forced them to go. The burden of obligation was shifted accordingly: whereas once the free high school offered a priceless opportunity to those who chose to take it, the high school now held a large captive audience that its administrators felt obliged to satisfy. As an educational committee of the American Youth Commission -wrote in 1940: "Even where a pupil is of low ability it is to be remembered that his attendance at secondary school is due to causes which are not of his making, and proper provision for him is a right which he is justified in claiming from society." What the High Schools Ought to Teach (Washington, 1940), pp. II-IA.

Hofstadter traces the cascade of effects that resulted from requiring all children to attend more school for more years.

“As the years went by, the schools filled with a growing proportion of doubtful, reluctant, or actually hostile pupils. It is a plausible conjecture that the average level of ability, as well as interest, declined. It became clear that the old academic curriculum could no longer be administered to a high-school population of millions in the same proportion as it had been to the 359,000 pupils of 1890. So long as public education had meant, largely, schooling in the primary grades, the American conviction that everyone can and should be educated was relatively easy to put into practice. But as soon as public education included secondary education, it began to be more doubtful that everyone could be educated, and quite certain that not everyone could be educated in the same way. Beyond a doubt, change was in order.

Moreover, the schools were under pressure not merely to fulfill the laws, but to become attractive enough to hold the voluntary allegiance of as large a proportion of the young for as long as they could. Manfully settling down to their assignment, educators began to search for more and more courses which, however dubious their merits by traditional educational standards, might interest and attract the young. In time they became far less concerned with the type of mind the high school should produce or with the academic side of the curriculum. (Boys and girls who wanted to go to college would hang on in any case; it was the others they had to please.) Discussions of secondary education became more frequently inter-larded with references to a new, decisive criterion of performance ‘the holding power of the school.’

The need to accept large numbers with varying goals and capacities and to exercise for many pupils a custodial function made it necessary for the schools to introduce variety into their curricula.”

In time, a watered down intellectualist approach turned from a necessary evil to a positive good. Hoftadter explains:

“Far from conceiving the mediocre., reluctant, or incapable student as an obstacle or a special problem in a school system devoted to educating the interested, the capable., and the gifted, American educators entered upon a crusade to exalt the academically uninterested or un-gifted child into a kind of culture-hero [Think Ferris Beuller]. They were not content to say that the realities of American social life had made it necessary to compromise with the ideal of education as the development of formal learning and intellectual capacity. Instead, they militantly proclaimed that such education was archaic and futile and that the noblest end of a truly democratic system of education was to meet the child’s immediate interests by offering him a series of immediate utilities. The history of this crusade, which culminated in the ill-fated life-adjustment movement of the 1940’s and 1950’s, demands our attention; for it illustrates in action certain widespread attitudes toward childhood and schooling, character and ambition, and the place of intellect in life.”

“The balance was tipping,” Hoftadter informs,

“The high schools were no longer to be expected to suit the colleges; instead, the colleges ought to try to resemble or accommodate the high schools.”

“In 1911, a new committee of the N.E.A., the Committee of Nine on the Articulation of High School and College, submitted another report, which shows that a revolution in educational thought was well on its way. The change in personnel was itself revealing. Gone were the eminent college presidents and distinguished professors of the 1893 report; gone, too, were the headmasters of elite secondary schools. The chairman of the Committee of Nine was a teacher at the Manual Training High School of Brooklyn, and no authority on any basic academic subject matter was on his committee, which consisted of school super intendents, commissioners, and principals, together with one professor of education and one dean of college faculties. Whereas the Committee of Ten had been a group of university men attempting to design curricula for the secondary schools, the new Committee of Nine was a group of men from public secondary schools, putting pressure through the N.E.A. on the colleges: ‘The requirement of four years of work in any particular subject, as a condition of admission to a higher institution, unless that subject be one that may properly be required of all high-school students, is illogical and should, in the judgment of this committee, be immediately discontinued.’"

“The task of the high school, the Committee of Nine argued,’was to lay the foundations of good citizenship and to help in the wise choice of a vocation,’ but it should also develop unique and special individual gifts, which was ‘quite as important as the development of the common elements of culture.’ The schools were urged to exploit the dominant interests ‘that each boy and girl has at the time.’ The committee questioned the notion that liberal education should precede the vocational: ‘An organic conception of education demands the early introduction of training for individual usefulness, thereby blending the liberal and the vocational. . . .’ It urged much greater attention to the role of mechanic arts, agriculture, and ‘household science’ as rational elements in the education of all boys and girls. Because of the traditional conception of college preparation, the public high schools were responsible for leading tens of thousands of boys and girls away from the pursuits for which they are adapted and in which they are needed, to other pursuits for which they are not adapted and in which they are not needed. By means of exclusively bookish curricula false ideals of culture are developed. A chasm is created between the producers of material wealth and the distributors and consumers thereof. By 1918 the ‘liberation’ of secondary education from college ideals and university control seems to have been consummated., at least on the level of theory, even if not yet in the nation’s high-school curricula.”

“In that year the N.E.A/s Commission on the Reorganization of Secondary Education formulated the goals of American schools in a document about which Professor Edgar B. Wesley has remarked that ‘probably no publication in the history of education ever surpassed this little five cent thirty-two page booklet in importance.’ A This statement, Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education, was given a kind of official endorsement by the United States Bureau of Education, which printed and distributed an edition of 130,000 copies.”

Cardinal Principles of Secondary Education made an anti-intellectual approach to education official policy. It insisted that

“the high school placed too much emphasis on intensive pursuit of most subjects. Studies should be reorganized so that a single year of work in a subject would be ‘of definite value to those who go no further.’ This would make the courses ‘better adapted to the needs both of those who continue and of those who drop out of school.’”

Insult followed injury. The report called on colleges to stop bullying high schools to teach subjects at levels that were too difficult for the common student.

“The commission further argued that the colleges and universities should follow the example of the secondary schools in considering themselves obliged to become mass institutions and to arrange their offerings accordingly. ‘The conception that higher education should be limited to the few is destined to disappear in the interests of democracy,’ it said prophetically. This meant, among other things, that high-school graduates should be able to go on to college not only with liberal but with vocational interests, and that, once in college, they should still be able to take whatever form of education they can which affords ‘profit to themselves and to society.’ In order to accommodate larger numbers, colleges and universities should supplant academic studies to some degree with advanced vocational education.”

“The commission quite reasonably urged that the high-school curriculum should be differentiated to offer a wide range of alternatives” says Hofstadter,

“but its way of expressing this objective was revealing: “The basis of differentiation should be, in the broad sense of the term, vocational, thus justifying the names commonly given, such as agricultural, business, clerical, industrial, fine-arts, and house hold-arts curriculums. Provision should be made also for those having distinctively academic interests and needs.”

“Increasingly, the mental world of the professional educationist became separated from that of the academic scholar,” the author explains.

“It is hard for an amateur, and perhaps even a professional in education, to know how much of this was justified. But two things it does seem possible to assert: first, that curricular change after 1910 was little short of revolutionary; and second, that by the 1940’s and 1950’s, the demands of the life-adjustment educators for the destruction of the academic curriculum had become practically insatiable.”

“The old academic curriculum, as endorsed by the Committee of Ten, reached its apogee around 1910. In that year more pupils were studying foreign languages or mathematics or science or English - any one of these than all non-academic subjects combined. During the following forty-year span the academic subjects offered in the high-school curricula fell from about three fourths to about one fifth. Latin, taken in 1910 by 49 per cent of public high-school pupils in grades 9 to 12, fell by 1949 to 7.8 per cent. All modern-language enrollments fell from 84.1 per cent to 22 per cent. Algebra fell from 56.9 per cent to 26.8 per cent, and geometry from 30.9 per cent to 12.8 per cent; total mathematics enrollments from 89.7 per cent to 55 per cent. Total science enrollments, if one omits a new catch-all course entitled ‘general science’ fell from 81.7 per cent to 33.3 per cent; or to 54.1 per cent if general science is included. English, though it almost held its own in purely quantitative terms, was much diluted in many school systems.”

“When the Committee of Ten examined the high-school curricula in 1893, it found that forty subjects were taught, but six of these thirteen were offered in very few schools, the basic curriculum was founded on twenty-seven subjects. By 1941 no less than 274 subjects were offered, and only 59 of these could be classified as academic studies. What is perhaps most extraordinary is not this ten-fold multiplication of subjects, nor the fact that academic studies had fallen to about one fifth the number, but the response of educational theorists: they were convinced that academic studies were still cramping secondary education. In the life-adjustment movement, which flourished in the late 1940’s and the 1950’s with the encouragement of the United States Office of Education, there occurred an effort to mobilize the public secondary-school energies of the country to gear the educational system more closely to the needs of children who - were held to be in some sense uneducable.”

“Accordingly, life-adjustment educators soon became convinced that their high educational ideals should be applied not merely to the neglected sixty per cent: what was good for them would be good for all American youth, however gifted. They were designing, as the authors of one life-adjustment pamphlet quite candidly admitted, nothing less than ‘a blueprint for a Utopian Secondary School’ a school which, they added, ‘could be operated only by teachers of rare genius.’ As I. L. Kandel has sardonically remarked, the conviction of life adjustment was ‘that what is good for sixty per cent of the pupils attending high schools, and, according to reports, deriving no benefit from this plan, is also good for all pupils.’ These crusaders had thus succeeded in standing on its head the assumption of universality once made by exponents of the classical curriculum. Formerly, it had been held that a liberal academic education was good for all pupils. Now it was argued that all pupils should in large measure get the kind of training originally conceived for the slow learner. American utility and American democracy ‘would now be realized in the education of all youth.’ The life-adjustment movement would establish once and for all the idea that the slow learner is ‘in no sense’ the inferior of the gifted, and the principle that all curricular subjects, like all children, are equal. ‘There is no aristocracy of subjects,’ said the Educational Policies Commission of the N.E.A. in 1952, describing the ideal rural school. ‘Mathematics and mechanics, art and agriculture, history and home-making are all peers.’”

Education for All American Youth, A "Further Look (Washington, 1952), p. 140.

Consider the evidence Hofstadter was presenting in 1962:

“Witness the case of the course in "Home and Family Living" required repetitively in one New York State community in all grades from seven to ten. Among the topics covered were: "Developing school spirit," "My duties as a baby sitter," "Clicking with the crowd," "How to be liked," "What can be done about acne?" "Learning to care for my bedroom," "Making my room more attractive." Eighth-grade pupils were given these questions on a true-false test: "Just girls need to use deodorants." "Cake soap can be used for shampooing."

The end result is actually somewhat shocking.

“In the name of utility, democracy, and science, many educators had come to embrace the supposedly uneducable or less educable child as the center of the secondary-school universe, relegating the talented child to the sidelines. One group of educationists, looking forward to the day when ‘the aristocratic, cultural tradition of education [will be] completely and finally abandoned’ had this to say of pupils who showed unusual intellectual curiosity: ‘Any help we can give them should be theirs, but such favored people learn directly from their surroundings. Our efforts to teach them are quite incidental in their development. It is therefore unnecessary and futile for the schools to, attempt to gear their programs to the needs of unusual people.’ In this atmosphere, as Jerome Bruner puts it, ‘the top quarter of public school students, from which we must draw intellectual leadership in the next generation, is perhaps the group most neglected by our schools in the recent past.’"

“Possibly I exaggerate” says Hofstadter, “but otherwise it is hard to understand how an official of the Office of Education could have written this insensitive passage.”

“A considerable number of children, estimated at about four million, deviate sufficiently from mental, physical, and behavioral norms to require special educational provision. Among them are the blind and the partially seeing, the deaf and the hard of hearing, the speech-defective, the crippled, the delicate, the epileptic, the mentally deficient, the socially maladjusted, and the extraordinarily gifted.”

Hodstadter writes in the footnote to the above passage:

"Lloyd E. Blanch, Assistant Commissioner for Higher Education, United States Office of Education, writing in Mary Irwin 9 ed.: American Universities and Colleges, published by the American Council on Education (Washington, 1956), p- 8; italics added. It has been pointed out that the author was, after all, proposing special programs for the gifted, among others, but this consideration does not seem to me to mitigate the implications of this bizarre list of categories.”

In many respects it makes sense that a school needs to “fit” the children educated in it. But to assert that the child who wishes to pursue the development of a non-vocational intellect is a freak and a nuisance, is a painful irony for many. Imagine what it is like for an intellectually oriented child to attend school in a place where the principle proudly states:

“For this world it is deemed important that the pupil learn, not chemistry, but the testing of detergents; not physics, but how to drive and service a car; not history, but the operation of the local gas works; not biology, but the way to the zoo; not Shakespeare or Dickens, but how to write a business letter.”

Hofstadter concludes his book with a lengthy discussion of the philosophical approach of John Dewey. As interesting as it was to me, it tended to add words to an argument that I think was already finished and so I will leave it for some future post.

In conclusion, as I was reading, I began to wonder, “Why should there be an ‘anti-intellectual’ movement? Why should it bother someone practical that someone is out there spending their days learning “useless” impractical things? I suspect that it has something to do with the egalitarian values of a democracy that believes that no person should have more power or wealth than another. Maybe there is simply a notion that there is something pretentious and aristocratic about a small group of people looking down from the heights of their broader view of the world, thinking those below them as knowledge-peasants? As Hofstadter expresses it,

“Something was missing in the dialectic of American populistic democracy. Its exponents meant to diminish, if possible to get rid of, status differences in American life, to subordinate educated as well as propertied leadership.”

Maybe just as there is building resentment for the “one-percenters” who control most of the money, there is something that is considered un-American about owning more than a fair share of understanding. Never-mind that the question that led to it was long-orphaned by the majority.

Question for Comment: Do you think different kids need different schools? Or do we simply need schools that are better at meeting the needs of different kids?

08/13/2017

Morris Bishop’s 1963 Biography of Petrarch gave me more than I needed to know about Petrarch’s life and yet enough of what I wanted to know to make the extra worth it.

Petrarch was one of the first modern humans to spend a good deal of his life trying to figure his own emotions out on paper (King David aside perhaps). Petrarch was a devout Christian most of his life (with not a few moral lapses and no small share of pride) but he found the study of the self as interesting if not more interesting than the study of God. Petrarch' originality, said Edgar Quinet, a 19th-century French critic, "consists in having realized, for the first time, every moment of our existence contains in itself the substance of a poem, that every hour encloses an immortality.”

“Petrarch discovered that the smallest incidence of everyday life could be transformed into poetry,” writes Bishop,

“that they are themselves poetic. However common place his discovery may seem today, it was momentous for literature and for man's awareness of the holy wonder in his existence.”

“His songs delighted his contemporaries because of their verbal beauty and their exultation of love, and because they revealed the poetic quality of common place experience.”

It is difficult for me not to pity Petrarch. To someone who believes that emotional attachments are things that we chose, his life-struggles are to be regarded as completely self-inflicted. If, as Iago tells Rodrigo in Othello, “our wills are our gardens” then Petrarch would have been better served to have defended himself from Cupid’s arrow in the first place. He certainly would not have driven the shaft in deeper with poems of loss and longing his entire life.

Here is his story. On April 6, 1327, 23-year-old Francesco Petrarch laid eyes on a blonde-haired seventeen year old teenager by the name of Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d’Avignon and, according to his own testimony, found himself literally “smitten” forever after. [Think the Beatles song, I Saw Her Standing There]. “I entered the labyrinth” Petrarch says of that moment in his life. He would always attribute the cause to the maliciousness of Cupid who shot his love arrow at Petrarch because he was so unguarded and yet left Laura undisturbed because she was otherwise. She was, much to Petrarch’s loss and poetry’s gain, already a wife, a mother, and a devout Catholic.

According to Linda Gregerson’s brief 2015 panel discussion presentation “on the History of the Sonnet,”

“Love is something deeply embedded in the tradition [of sonnet writing] – erotic love that must be impeded. Crucial to this love and its function in the lyric poem is that – it’s got to be frustrated – by something. The lady is indifferent. The lady is already possessed by somebody else. Best of all, as both Dante and Petrarch discover, the lady dies. Its great. It makes her extremely useful as an agent of higher longing.” (Chancellor’s Conversations, Poets Forum, 2015 New York City (Poets.org)

Though Petrarch himself may have agreed sporadically, he certainly did not agree easily. He lived with a deep attachment to his vision of Laura for the rest of his mostly pious life, both encouraging and mortifying his affections in turn and often simultaneously. As Petrarch’s biographer, Morris Bishop wrote of the subject of his study, “In the chemistry of the spirit, emotions do not neutralize each other.” Unrequited lovers have been finding consolation in Petrarch’s sonnets for almost 700 years now.

Petrarch wrote poems for and about Laura until she died of the plague in 1348 and then continued to write poems about her until *he* died in in 1374, forty-seven years after his transcendental experience in the church in Avignon.

According to Bishop, the sweet new style of poetry that Petrarch perfected idealized love and the beloved while bringing the woman loved down to earth (unlike Dante’s Beatrice). “Love rises from it sensual origins to a level of purity, where it blends with the divine,” Bishop tells us of this courtly way to think about romance.

“The beloved becomes Gods emissary on earth; her purpose is to guide the poet, to redeem him from earthly evil, to purify him in beauty. Thus, the beloved takes on some of the attributes of divinity, and the poet, by way of earthly love, attains to love divine.”

Petrarch’s mistake was to “nurture an attachment” (as Jane Austen might phrase it) with an idea of a woman who he would never be able to experience as anything other than an abstraction. Where there is a differential between what is wanted and what is, there is suffering the Buddhists would tell us and thus Petrarch suffered (and like Goethe, Rousseau, and Chateaubriand, grew famous and rich from writing about his suffering). Bishop, who greatly admires Petrarch, chalks the suffering up to biopsychology.

“Petrarch’s melancholy states may be explained by the brutal solutions of every day bourgeois common sense. He was a vigorous, sensible, and very emotional man, now passed thirty. He was vowed to clerical rectitude, for which he had no vocation. Nature summoned him to take a mate, to beget children and guard their growth, to perform gladly, for their sake, the humdrum tasks of shelter building and food getting, at the cost of bidding farewell to poetry. But for social and economic reasons he was defying the physiological imperative ...”

Damned imperatives. Perhaps, continues Bishop even more directly, the source of Petrarch’s troubles – “though a stimulation to achievement – was non-ecclesiastical celibacy.” Petrarch once wrote that he felt “forever something unsatisfied in my heart." To Bishop, the something unsatisfied “resulted from his defiance of nature's simplest injunction without his accepting the training or obtaining the rewards of the clerical celibate.”

Alas, Petrarch had the sort of mind that believed that books and God and nature could provide the mind with sufficient contact to offset the deprivations of the other senses. Listen to him as he tries to triangulate past his physiology.

"What good is it for me to enter this wilderness alone, to follow the river courses, to explore the forest, to sit on the mountain tops, if wherever I go my mind follows in the wild just as in the cities? The mind must be laid aside. The mind, I say, must be left at home, but I must humbly pray God to create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit within me then, at last I will have penetrated the secrets of the solitary life."

“[My books] are friends illustrious in speech, intelligence, government, war, not difficult; they are content with a corner in my humble house, never reluctant or boring, eagerly obedient to my command, ready to come or go at my call. Now these, now those I interrogate, and they answer me at length, telling their tales and singing their songs. Some explore the secrets of nature, some give counsel on better living and better dying; some tell their own high deeds and those of past heroes, and make old times live again in their words. Some drive away my distresses with their cheer, and bring back laughter to me with their fun. Some teach me to bear all burdens, to hope for nothing, to know my self. They are the artificers of peace, war, agriculture, law, navigation. They raise me up in adversity, curb me in prosperity, bid me look to the end, remind me of the swift days and of life’s brevity. For all these gifts they ask a small price only an open door to my house and heart, for hostile fate has left them few refuges in the world and only reluctant friends. If they are admitted, they think any lurking place a mansion, and lie trembling until the frigid clouds may pass and the Muses again be welcomed. They do not require that silken hangings cover my bare walls or that rich foods perfume my table, or that my halls resound with the clamor of many servants attending a throng of guests. My sober troop of books are content with their own provisions and share them with me, as I sit wearily on my rose colored bench. They give me sacred food and pour me sweet nectar:’

Petrarch described this intellectual single man’s compensatory bibliomania in a letter written from Vaucluse between 1345 and 1347.

“Divine favour has freed me from most human passions, but one insatiable lust remains—I can’t get enough books. Perhaps now I have more than I need; but with books as with other things, the more one gets the more one wants. And books have their own special quality. They thrill you to the marrow, they talk to you, counsel you, admit you to their living, speaking friendship. And they introduce you to other books, their friends.”

Petrarch would, like Thoreau, retreat to a waterside nature reserve to drink his fill of thought, of nature, of books, and writing. Vaucluse, France was Petrarch’s Walden. As Bishop puts it, “Vaucluse and Walden would lie close together in a spiritual geography.” But it never worked for long. Petrarch would frequently have to pack his travel bags and search for his missing piece in travel, in awards, in notoriety, in fame, in usefulness, in art, in collecting ancient texts, in anything that he thought might help him fit his Laura-sized soul-hole.

“If the woods and streams could for fill our needs,” Bishop writes,

“Vaucluse would be enough. But nature requires something more. The mob thinks that philosophers and poets are hard as rocks, but in this it is wrong, as in so much. They are too flesh and blood; they keep their human nature, though they reject fleshly pleasures. There is a limit of necessity for both philosophers and poets, and it is dangerous to transgress it."

Over time, Petrarch would accomplish much and write more. But he became less and less of a fulfilled human. And he felt it. And those around him felt it. Whether he would have stopped feeling for Laura had he stopped writing about her is an interesting question. He was a romantic hemophiliac it appears, a hemophiliac who had a talent for picking scabs. But he did at least consider the cure he was not willing to take. “May the patient interrupt the doctor for a moment?” he asks himself in the midst of one of his internal dialogues,

“Let me tell you this – I can never love anyone else. My eyes are so used to gazing upon her, my mind is so used to admiring her, that all that is not she, seems dark and ugly. So if you command me to love another in order to free myself from love, you were asking the impossible. It's all over. I am done for.”

As he puts it in one of his sonnets,

I am in terror when I scrutinizeThe minds clear record of our parting day.I left my heart with her and came away,And yet my thought to her forever flies.

It is interesting. Petrarch went to school to be a lawyer because that was where the money was. He quit the law as soon as he could saying that he could not bear the idea of “making a merchandise of his mind.” He seems to have done exactly that with his heart. His poems of unrequited love were famous all over Europe and it is his poems, more than anything else he wrote, that we remember him for.

Question for Comment: Morris Bishop writes: “If we say that [Petrarch’s] love was exaggerated, we can only mean ‘exaggerated for us.’ We admit out own incapacity to exaggerate thus. Maybe we are condemning ourselves, not Petrarch.”

When does Petrarch’s level of devotion to Laura become something less than admirable? As soon as it comes into existence? When it creates suffering to no end or purpose? When it leaves the world shy one person’s healthy ability to commit to anyone else?

When the Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann was brought to Jerusalem for trial, New Yorker magazine hired Hannah Arendt to go and observe them and write a series of articles about her reflections. This movie is the story of those reflections and the response that they provoked. The internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a summary as well as I can:

“From Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem (where he had been brought after Israeli agents found him in hiding in Argentina), Arendt concluded that far from exhibiting a malevolent hatred of Jews which could have accounted psychologically for his participation in the Holocaust, Eichmann was an utterly innocuous individual. He operated unthinkingly, following orders, efficiently carrying them out, with no consideration of their effects upon those he targeted. The human dimension of these activities were not entertained, so the extermination of the Jews became indistinguishable from any other bureaucratically assigned and discharged responsibility for Eichmann and his cohorts.

Arendt concluded that Eichmann was constitutively incapable of exercising the kind of judgement that would have made his victims' suffering real or apparent for him. It was not the presence of hatred that enabled Eichmann to perpetrate the genocide, but the absence of the imaginative capacities that would have made the human and moral dimensions of his activities tangible for him. Eichmann failed to exercise his capacity of thinking, of having an internal dialogue with himself, which would have permitted self-awareness of the evil nature of his deeds. This amounted to a failure to use self-reflection as a basis for judgement, the faculty that would have required Eichmann to exercise his imagination so as to contemplate the nature of his deeds from the experiential standpoint of his victims.”

“Eichmann utterly surrendered that single most defining human quality,” she says in the film’s final speech, “that of being able to think, consequently he was no longer capable of making normal judgments.”

Her assertion was troubling and offensive to many readers of her argument because she asserted that it was not only the perpetrators of the holocaust who had surrendered their human freedom to thin, but that similar surrenders happened all over the world, including the victims themselves.

“And not only in Germany, but in almost all countries. Not only among the persecutor, but also among the victims."

Many took offense. Should victims ever be blamed for anything? Should they not get a free pass? Arendt did not think so. The charge of “not thinking” – of not maintaining a dialog with yourself about your culture’s assertions – is applicable to anyone anywhere – regardless of what majority or minority they are associated with.

Question for Comment: “I just wasn’t thinking.” Ever looked at something you have done that you should not have done and said that?